The deeper, century-long roots of the Middle East conflict

THE EDITOR, Madam:

Right after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres accused Israel of bearing responsibility. “It did not happen in a vacuum,” he said. He was right. It did not happen in a vacuum, but like Canada, the UK, France and Australia, he is totally ignorant of the history of the region and was promoting Jew-hatred.

Radical Islam has been waging a 100-year war against the world, but we have not acknowledged it.

For 400 years, the Middle East belonged to the Ottoman Empire. When Turkey, allied with Germany, lost World War I, it lost its empire as well. The victors divided southern Syria into Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria at San Remo in 1920, establishing mandates until these territories could become self-governing. Palestine was designated the reconstituted Jewish homeland, though Britain soon detached 78 per cent of it and handed that portion to the Hashemites.

In 1922, the League of Nations unanimously enacted the San Remo accords. Meanwhile, in Egypt in 1928, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, dedicated to spreading a global Caliphate. Today, Qatar is the centre of this expansion, and the Oct. 7 attack could not have occurred without support from Iran and Qatar.

Within the Palestine mandate, Haj Amin al-Husseini orchestrated pogroms from 1920 to 1942, created Bosnian Muslim Waffen-SS units in WWII, and intervened to send 4,000 Hungarian Jewish children to the gas chambers. Though captured after the war by the French, he was allowed to escape.

When the United Nations was founded in 1945, Article 80 preserved previous commitments to the Jewish people, affirming borders that included Gaza, Judea and Samaria. In 1947, the Arab leadership rejected another UN partition proposal and launched the Nakba with the goal of driving Jews into the sea.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union created the PLO in 1964, uniting regional fighters under the new label “Palestinians.”

The 1995 Oslo Accords brought Yasser Arafat and 100,000 followers into Israel, even though Arafat himself likened the agreement to Mohammed’s pact with the Quraysh – a treaty he later broke violently. We failed then, and still fail now, to grasp the long-term strategy of radical Islam.

No one can expect America or Israel to accept a ceasefire that leaves Islamists in power. The Ayatollahs’ war against the West will end only when Iran and its proxies surrender.

JACQUES FORTIER

Montreal, Canada